Author Archives: Naptimewriting

Dear chemists…

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I’d like to request a baby shampoo feature, my chemist friends.

Would you please find a way, between the chemical-free, safe, healthy, organic, SLS-free, all-natural shampoos in phthalate-free bottles and the chemical-filled, fragranced, toxic, cancer-causing shampoos in BPA-enhanced bottles, to create one that keeps small children from screaming as though their heads have been severed whenever said shampoo is applied?

We’ve tried Little Twig, California Baby, Nature’s Baby, Jason Organics, Dr. Bronner’s, and (on vacation) Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. All must have lye and sulfuric acid as hidden, secret government-mind-control ingredients, for my son screams as though the skin is being burned from his scalp. Even before it touches his head. That’s some strong acid.

While you’re at it, chemical wizards, could you work on the water, too? We have the same problem with any water applied to the child’s cranial area.

Please do not suggest that the problem is with the child. This is America. We solve our problems with technology and ingenuity, damnit, not with behavioral shifts.

Thanks for your better living through chemicals, y’all. Glad I could come to you with this issue and know you can apply your knowledge, skills, and multinational conglomeration dollars to saving our ear drums, heartstrings, and sanity.

Toodles.

I swear to you…

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…this is true. I can’t make this stuff up.

After Peanut’s bath, Spouse helps him into his jammies. Except that P has been dying to wear his Hanukkah leotard and when they come out of the bedroom, they both beam because Spouse has helped my son into his pink leotard…backward. Effectively his first thong.

Peanut says, “I’m not sure if I want to wear my new leotard to bed. I want to add a bell to it so if I need Mommy and Daddy in the nighttime, I can ring the bell. It’s gonna be a really loud bell.”

Hmmm. Possibly worst idea ever. Maybe. If you include the tiny wedgie that will have him ringing the bell all night long.

One for the baby book

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Sweet developmental moments we should add to all baby books:

First booger joke
First time Mom or Dad told you “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, buddy”
First game involving tying grandma to a chair
First doll you nursed
First doll you beheaded
First time you made Mommy bleed (separate entries for nipples, intentional, and accidental wounds)
Moment you realized screaming at the top of your lungs made Mom and Dad lose their minds
First year you cried that you didn’t get more Christmas presents
Tallest store display you toppled
First menorah injury
Name of first person to whom you shouted “I don’t like you”
Photo of child at preschool to whom you said, “I can’t understand whining. Use a different voice”
First day that, beginning to end, was an unceasing joy

Car seat decision extravaganza

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I’ve been researching car seats trying to decide how to handle the fast-approaching small person/smaller person car seat shuffle. We still have Peanut’s infant seat available for the first nine months or so. We didn’t get a convertible until Peanut was 8 months because he was, well, a peanut, and we wanted the removable ease of the infant carrier. We never really took it out of the car, and had him in a sling rather than carrying the car seat or clipping it to a stroller. Still worth it, though. Infant seats just seem to fit better and make babies happier than swimming in a convertible seat. Of our friends, the two who used a convertible seat from birth noted with considerable frustration that their infants screamed during every car ride, presumably because the huge seat wasn’t comfortable. That’s not research, that’s tiny sample, anecdotal take-it-for-what-its-worth data, but still. We’re glad we have the infant seat available.

For now Peanut is fine in his Decathlon, and would be for a few more years. But eventually he’ll need a booster, and I’m trying to find a way to get him into a dual-use booster or high-back booster before TBA needs the convertible.

Because we’re really cautious and go as far with AAP recommendations as we can (the AAP recommends keeping them rear-facing as long as possible and in a harness as long as possible, so we kept P rear-facing until he was two and will keep him in a harness until his seat’s maximum) I want a booster that has a five-point harness that will last until 70-80 pounds and that will convert to a backless booster after 80 pounds.

Institute for Highway Safety has recommendations for boosters, and I wish this info were available at retailers. Why should I compare based on features and colors when there is solid safety research available? Because that’s the way retailers and manufacturers want it. Sigh.

I’m also finding that more manufacturers are building convertible seats that last much longer for both rear-facing and forward-facing harnessed children. That means I’m considering getting another convertible seat, something I was trying to avoid with the whole booster solution. But the best boosters and the best convertibles cost the same, so I’m open to either solution.

For general car seat research, I’ve found a lot of info at Carseatblog.com. Comparative pricing information better than a google shopping search updates often at the Car Seat Place. At the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, they’re only willing to tell us how easy a seat is to use, but insist that all seats are safe. Gee, federal government, thanks for using my money to tell me if the labels are clear. How about you go back to focusing on ensuring that they all do actually pass your safety tests, and leave the label reading to someone else? You’re welcome, taxpayers, for the 10 cents I just saved each of you.

Shame on Consumer Reports for making car seat reviews available by subscription only. I understand making people pay for reviews of microwaves and televisions, but car seats? Public service, y’all.

Speaking of…do, please keep your children buckled in at all times, regardless of how far you’re going or how few cars are on the road; rear facing until at least 24 months*; and in a harness as long as possible.

So we’ve decided to go with this booster, which allows a harness to 80 lbs (or 53″) and accommodates use as a booster to 100 lbs (or 60″). It’s approved on airplanes, which is important to us. Second place on our list is this convertible seat that works to 53″ and is foldable for travel and carpools. Deciding factor was the Frontier’s booster option for taller kids and higher weights, and the fact that Peanut wanted a pink car seat but not a flowered car seat. Now we’re just hoping he still likes pink when he’s 9, or that car seats can be spray painted.

[It has not escaped this blogger’s attention that she would practically fit in a child’s booster and that, according to the recommendations, she would have been in a booster through freshman year of high school.]

*Several studies show “the standard advice of turning a baby from rear-facing to forward-facing at one year and at least 20 pounds puts a child at greater risk for severe injury than if they were to remain rear facing.”

Dr. Jekyl and Ms. Hyde

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Today’s installment of awesome mom/terrible mom:

Peanut: Mommy, get this damned thing out of my way!
Me: Well, you put that damned thing there, so you move it out of your own damned way.
P: Oh. Yeah. [moves the damned thing and goes about his business.]

My New Year’s resolutions were going to be to let him handle more himself and to swear more. Looks like I have both covered.

Last minute invention

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In these waning moments of 2009, I have invented a new, patented wondrous technological addition to my life…the Couldn’t-Care-Less-O-Meter. It gauges just how much I don’t care so I can waste less time machinating about the silly little things. Let’s give a whirl, shall we?

Spilled three cups of dry rice on the floor: Don’t Care! Welcome opportunity to sweep a neglected floor.

Can’t find the list of things I *have* to do today: Couldn’t Care Less! Clearly not important if I need a piece of paper to remember them.

Didn’t submit either of my articles to journals this year: Don’t Care! Job market sucks so maybe a PhD is a bad idea anyway! Welcome opportunity to look into minimum wage jobs that I can begin now rather than minimum wage professorships I wouldn’t begin until 2018, anyway.

Getting older and have nothing to show for it: Really Don’t Care! When I was younger I had nothing to show for that, either. Nasty, brutish, and short, y’all. Nasty. Brutish. Short.

House is a mess; Ding ding ding! Genuinely Couldn’t Care Less! Have a whole heap of failures to count, but that one can be passed off on several other members of this family.

Take the patented Couldn’t-Care-Less-O-Meter.out for a spin, readers. I guarantee it’ll help you realize how little you care about your deepest fears right now.

Just in time to ring in a whole new year of failure and apathy! Happy New Year!

What I really want to do is direct

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It’s overcast and cold today and I’m feeling melancholy. This, in addition to reminding me why I shudder each time Spouse recommends Portland, Oregon as a solution to his job woes and our financial woes, makes this MLA panel piece by Brian Croxall on the dismal prospects for academics in my field lately even more poignant.

(The punchline, if you don’t feel like reading it? Full time professors these days qualify for food stamps, and jobs for both Tweedy Tenure Track and its neglected stepchild Oliver Adjunct are beyond pathetic, hurting students, graduates, and Universities in a rather horrifying spiral. A rather nasty, brutish, and short career view paper read at an MLA panel that complements today’s intensely depressing Fresh Air interview of Woody Allen. Come on, people. The decade was bad enough without this layer of realism and honesty. It’s like living in a William Dean Howells novel today.)

It’s no fun to be depressed without some data to back you up. So here you go, courtesy of a Tweet by my recent conference panelmate Matt Bucher. Thanks, man. Contagious academic depression is almost enjoyable as an academic dissection of a funeral. Cheers!

You’re right. 2000s were worthless.

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Op-ed piece crossed my ‘pooter just as I was thinking this, too…what a crappy decade.

[My semi-unrelated two cents? Please, in this week’s retrospectives, let’s all try to behave responsibly toward apostrophes in decade references. They were the 2000s. Or the ’00s. This is 2009’s final hour. For advanced punctuators, the ’00s’ last hurrah. No apostrophe for plurals, yes apostrophes for possessive. Please.]

An anonymous note

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Look, all I’m saying is that, if you leave your favorite chocolate out in plain view, where anyone cleaning out the closets in a end-of-the-year fit of “I have to have something to show for my year besides half finished articles, unpublished novels, a couple of conference badges, and a temporarily delightful three-year-old” productivity in which he or she moves the furniture around [again] and reorganizes the closets, why then I think said chocolate is fair game.

It was only tucked into the pocket of a jacket you rarely use, probably in a vain attempt to foil my chocolate radar. Unfortunately, you should know me well enough to know I’m more of a candy hoarder than a candy eater (if that’s possible) and that I’m always checking closet pockets for cash, anyway.

So, really, it’s your fault. For the obvious hiding place and for the general ignorance of the rules of chocolate engagement.

That’s all. Not my fault. Totally your fault.

Also, not the best chocolate, either. You have poor taste in chocolate and hiding places. Wipe off that sourpuss and go get some Guittard. I left you some of your stuff. Now get me a substitute before I finish your stash. The other hiding spots are dry.

Full of surprises.

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The days I expect to go by without incident are constant battles of spirited-intense-intelligent-feisty small-person will versus spirited-intense-intelligent-feisty parent will. Hell on wheels trying to be gentle and only rarely succeeding is the baseline around here.

But when I think things *should* be tough Peanut makes me laugh and relax (as he did last year when we spent eight hours shopping in a holiday marathon totalling more than the rest of the year combined, and today when we needed extra supplies for tomorrow’s bake-fest of multiple goodies) He’s patient when I least expect it; giving, sweet, and loving not necessarily when i need it, but when I really appreciate it.

I laughed at several proclamations in the car and stores today, surrounded as we were by people trying their best to cram 4,000 things into their day, and doing a pretty poor job of holding it together—including “I want to have pfefferneuse every day if it has protein!” and “don’t worry, Mommy, if they don’t have healthy rice cereal we can make the cookies out of healthy oatmeal.”

My favorite, though, which had other people in the way overcrowded supermarket laughing:
P: I see candy corn!
M: Yes.
P: I think I want some.
M: Not today.
P: Well, for Halloween.
M: Halloween is 10 months away, so we’re set on candy corn for now.
P: 10 months?!?!?
M: Yup.
P: I can wait.

Dear Universe…

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Here’s the thing, Universe. I know you have plenty of secular humanist quantum physics believers coming to you for their own personal issues. I know some people ask God for a football win and some promise rewards to various saints for getting what they need. But you, Universe, are more than just convenience. You are the problem.

If you could just, for a while, and just in our house, suspend all your physical laws, I would really appreciate it. Because the reality in which objects fall when not balanced properly on a spoon, where yarn is not strong enough to operate as a tow line for a bicycle, where puzzles do not fall into completion without effort and within moments of tumbling out of their box…this reality simply will not do for a certain 3.75 year old who lives here.

Look, I’m not one of those helicopter parents who want to fix the world for their kid. I just want the screaming to stop. When a blanket refuses to stay on the handlebars of a two-pound scooter, he screams as though he were on fire. When a one-foot doll cannot fit into a nine-inch fire engine, he cries as though someone severed his head from his tiny body.

So seriously, Universe, do this for me. For my sanity. He’ll learn physics in school like everyone else, as long as this country still teaches science by the time he’s in school. If not, meh. He doesn’t need to be all exerciing his natural scientific abilities on my time. I’m doing my part for you, Universe, what with obeying the law of gravity and keeping a finger on the pulse on the whole “liquid on Saturn’s moon” awesomeness.

So throw me a freaking bone, wouldya?

I swear…

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If I make it through this year I deserve a prize. Not a “health care is finally a bit more humane now that we’ve managed the middle man a smidge” award. Not a “saving lives” or even “making lives better” award. Not an award for patience, heaven knows; nor an award for treating man or beast well. Not an award that says “thanks for making the plant better and humanity seem less terrible.”

Just a plain old “making it through each day without offing yourself or anyone else, trying your best to be respectful, watching your mouth, and doing your best to be and raise a decent citizen by the skin of your teeth” award.

If you deserve one, too, by all means, give yourself one. Heck, give yourself one for each day you make it through. I’d offer to give you an award, or create some cute little certificate for you to print, but if you saw the list of other things I need to do and the basic Euclidean-space-temporal framework in which I’m forced to operate, you’d do the work for me.

Happy Freaking Solstice. Hope your night is nigh as long as mine.

Well, it seemed like a good idea…

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Successful planning is biting me in the ass again.

I have to admit my terrible flaw (that’s right. just one.) I’m a hyperplanner. I used to begin assignments the day they were announced, drawing up a timeline that allowed for two serious mishaps and a twice-edited paper by the day before the deadline. And I would stick to the schedule. I acknowledge how gross that is, but also offer that it’s a wicked good skill for freelancing and writing in graduate school.

I plan holiday presents in October, because that’s when I think of them. I buy holiday items eleven months in advance because that’s when they’re on sale. (Did you just suggest I get Hannukah candles a month late? Shame on you for talking to everyone who has ever met me. It just takes a little perspective shift for parsimonious to be 11 months early, dammit. And surprised every year when I open the December-decorations box and find new things with the tags still on them.)

(Also? Bite me. The world at large and the people who care about such nonsense are lucky I even decorate. Waste of my dwindling goodwill and patience, decorating. I still wrap presents by putting them in recycled tissue paper and cramming them in a sort-of-the-right-sized bag. Not a gift bag. Just any not-plastic bag. Cuz I’m that classy. And lazy. And cheap.)

Anyway, this year Peanut started his present list a week after his March birthday. I have never, ever bought him something in a store on request. I always tell him we can put it on his gift list, and I type it into my phone’s memo field. (Spouse just showed me how inefficient I am because when Peanut asked for something last week, Spouse took a picture on his phone so all the info, including price, is right there. Um, wow. That’s wicked efficient. I bow to you, Mr. Pants’-Seat-Flyer Who Has Awesome Ideas on Cutting Corners.)

So in November, when family started asking for Peanut’s list, I had it ready. And I offered to buy the items locally for people to save on shipping and to support local family-owned stores. Many relatives agreed. Way cool. All desired gifts are present and accounted for way before I get nervous that the deadline approaches.

Small problem, though.

I now have to wrap more than a few presents. Spouse and I gave Peanut a small gift for each night of Hannukah, plus a big present for Solstice and one for Christmas. There is no Santa gift to wrap, thankfully. (In our family Santa picks up presents to give to charity but doesn’t deliver because we’re lucky and can give instead of receive from the pretend old bearded guy who is just a story so don’t ask how he gets in the house). But there are, like, a dozen other presents to wrap. I’m used to one a night and then reusing the paper for the next day. I think he’s gonna notice if they’re all in the same pink tissue paper I’ve been using since my birthday two years ago. (Thanks, Mom, for being one of those Martha Stewart wrappers who includes a whole ream of tissue in the gloriously sparkled and themed gift bag. The rose and fuscia paper has served the pinkphilic child through seven major holidays thus far. And counting. [the secret is no tape. Just surround the gift rather than really wrap it.]

But this year’s stash will task my supply. So I’m considering newspaper (dammit, I read online) and magazine pages (dammit, I forgot to steal some from the dentist) or actually buying wrapping paper.

Or just hiding gifts in the house, scavenger-hunt style. Now *that* would go over big with the grandparents.

Tis the season. In Berkeley.

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Know why I love living in Berkeley? Because everyone this morning around town is wishing each other a Happy Winter Solstice.

It is, after all, the next holiday. And an obvious one, since children all over town are up well before dawn because the damned planet is conspiring to remind us how completely in control physics is and parents are not. I’m hoping the solstice is soon because I want my sunrise back to sometime before lunch. Channukah’s almost over. Christmas is almost a week away. Next up? Solstice. And around here, it is another excuse to be nice to each other. It’s not L.A. or Boston at the CheeseBoard, I can tell you that. It’s friendly happy time. You’d think all these secular humanists actually treated people with respect despite their blatant heathen lifestyle.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Wax on, wax off

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I have twenty posts, or so, to write, and myriad other things to tackle, but I have to say this…
Why, since we got home from our five-day vacation in the snow (which went almost perfectly, considering the trouble we could have had flying into the high desert in December with an almost four-year-old and a whiny pregnant lady to drive into the middle of nowhere for fun in the snow with family and vegetarian posole) has my return home felt like the reverse of the Mr. Miagi clap-and-rub? All energy sucked from me by the cold hands of incessant, useless, endless repetition of rules and basic social tenets, greeted with surly and defiant nastiness. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence.

At least Daniel got valuable skills in the film, and the chance, eventually, to kick the crap out of the nasty guy. I get the skills but no violent outlet. Mr. Miagi got the pride of being a fabulous coach AND he got his whole to-do list taken care of by someone else.

I get to do all the work and may, MAY someday get to smile as my kid uses his guts and skill to kick the crap out of someone else. For a change, please, kick the crap out of someone else.